Believe it or not, snail-like sea creatures are vanishing in a part of the Southern Ocean due to the human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists have already predicted that a group of tiny snail-like sea creatures crucial to the marine food web may one day disappear due to the changing ocean chemistry.

Now a new survey conducted by Geraint Tarling and his colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge concludes that the corrosive seas are damaging pteropods much before than expected.

The high amounts of man-made acidification lead to the shell loss of the snails in the South Atlantic Ocean. As deep frigid water normally contains more carbon dioxide, its pH is naturally lower than that of surface waters.

Recent researches prove that the change is actually taking place much faster than expected. In the acidification process, CO2 air pollution works in the water to form carbonic acid that dissolves the calcium shells of sea snails and other mollusks. Consequently, they get exposed to acidification.

The possible solutions for this ocean acidification include frantically dumping large quantities of limestone in the ocean.

Everybody relax and go back to whatever you were doing. This story is just another alarmist-laden study typical of the government sponsored PR and agenda-driven media hype that always precedes meetings like COP18.

As is typical, the story makes the outlandish claims that are simply not supported by science. Hopefully this is because of lazy reporter bias and not the scientists. The reporter says, for example, that “Scientists predicted that average acidity of these oceans will be triple all over the world and this will be the first time in around 20 million years.” Really! I,m sorry, I just don’t believe a real scientist said that. Crustaceans have been around for 500 million years. Besides, tripling the decrease in pH that we think (but don’t really know) we have experienced over the past 250 years will still leave the Ocean far, far from being acidic.

So as I said you can just move on, friends. Nothing here. You needn’t worry about these cute little snails.

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